How-to: Set Up Google Dynamic Remarketing

Late last month, Google rolled out dynamic remarketing to all advertisers managing AdWords accounts linked to the Google Merchant Center. Though this mostly applies to eCommerce clients, Google is also working on launching this feature in the travel and education sectors, which should have access later this year.

Dynamic remarketing allows advertisers to create dynamic display ads based off products users viewed on a company’s website, resulting in unique, highly relevant ads for each user. This can be extremely beneficial for advertisers, especially those managing accounts for clients offering a wide variety of products.

How to Set Up Dynamic Remarketing

Setting up a dynamic remarketing campaign is very similar to the set-up of a regular remarketing campaign (with a few slight changes). Here goes:

1) Create a new ‘Display Network Only’ campaign. Choose remarketing and then opt into dynamic remarketing by checking the box ‘Enable dynamic remarketing’.

2) If you haven’t done so already, you will need to link your Merchant Center account. Google offers step-by-step instructions if it recognizes the account hasn’t been linked yet; you can also find them here.

3) Select the product extension or merchant center account you would like to use for the campaign. You can select the product extension/merchant center account in the drop-down box highlighted in red below. Choose the rest of your campaign settings and click save and continue.

4) If this is the first dynamic remarketing campaign created in the account, you will need to add a dynamic remarketing tag to your website. Google will prompt you for your email address and will send you the tag as well as detailed instructions for adding the tag.

(Note: if you have an existing remarketing code, you can actually create the new code by adding a few Google-specific params to your existing code; here’s more from Google.)

5) Google will automatically create five remarketing lists that can be used within your campaign. These lists include:

– All visitors – People who visited pages that contain your remarketing tags

– General visitors – People who visited your website but did not view any specific products.

– Product viewers – People who viewed specific product pages on your site but did not create a shopping cart

– Shopping cart abandoners – People who added products to the shopping cart but did not complete the purchase

– Past buyers – People who purchased products from you in the past.

These lists will appear with the rest of the remarketing lists in the Audiences section of the Shared Library. You can create new lists according to your goals or use existing lists as long as they are not old tag-based audiences.

6) Create your ad groups and choose the remarketing lists to target.

7) Create ads using the dynamic ad builder. To do so, click on new ad, display ad builder, then select ‘dynamic’ under the advanced section of the left rail. From there you have the option to choose from either image or text ad templates.

As with other ads, you can test different headlines, description lines, CTAs, etc. Google offers a variety of layout options as well as customizable colors, fonts, and backgrounds to closely match your brand. You can also select certain ad sizes or opt into all, and a preview is shown of each size before you set live to ensure everything looks okay. Below are some examples of dynamic remarketing ads:

It is important to remember that dynamic remarketing pulls the product images, titles, descriptions, prices, etc., from the product feed, so optimizing the feed and keeping it live is crucial to the success of the campaign. High-quality images with short, concise product titles will have a huge impact on CTR and will increase the chances of bringing in higher conversion volume.

It’s still early days for Google’s dynamic ads, so we’re going to get the data rolling in and follow up with performance updates and optimization tips. Stay tuned!

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Search Account Manager Dan Hilbert runs some of our biggest ecommerce accounts. When not optimizing campaigns, he can be spotted cheering for the Chicago Blackhawks.